Supporting Vulnerable Women and Children in Kolkata, India

So, according to this week’s The Economist (March 3 rd 2018), India’s “armies of ragpickers” are responsible for the fact that India does not feature in the world’s top ten biggest plastic polluters.   Despite having the world’s second biggest population at 1.3 billion. India is poor enough, it goes on to say, for ragpickers to exist, unlike Asia’s biggest polluters, like Vietnam, which isn’t.    Well, good for India.   Good for those entrepreneurial souls who can literally make a living from rubbish.   Producing a meal from the proceeds of ragpicking I should also mention on this International Women’s Day that the vast majority of those rag pickers are women.   Illiterate, destitute, and living in illegal makeshift shelters beside railway tracks, canals (open sewers) or on the streets, they scour the streets for waste that they can sell on to dealers.   They are looking for plastics, paper, cardboard, metals – anything they can sel...